Dell EMC Unity vs. SolidFire

Dell EMC Unity is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 113 reviews vs SolidFire which is ranked 11th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 14 reviews. The top reviewer of Dell EMC Unity writes "Hits a sweet spot for us between price point and the amount of storage and performance". The top reviewer of SolidFire writes "Some of the valuable features are compression, deduplication, and thin provisioning". Dell EMC Unity is most compared with HPE 3PAR Flash Storage, NetApp All Flash FAS and Pure Storage FlashArray. SolidFire is most compared with NetApp All Flash FAS, Pure Storage FlashArray and Dell EMC XtremIO Flash. See our Dell EMC Unity vs. SolidFire report.

Quotes From Members Comparing Dell EMC Unity vs. SolidFire

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

It is easy to scale, maintain, and manage.They have a Unity REST API that I use to automate some of the storage stuff. I'm just getting started with it, but it seems pretty easy to use.It has saved us time when provisioning new storage, so we're trying to automate that process.Compared to our old platform, everything is more tightly integrated. I don't have to go to different sections to do something. A lot of it is wizard-driven, so it's an easy to use system.Integration; We use the product with VMware, and also use it with Syft for home directory and departmental shares.Purchasing; We worked with a sales rep to purchase our Unity.They've integrated NAS and SAN pretty well. It made replication very simple. Because one of our systems has a lot of LANs, for it to replicate we have Consistency Groups in there. That's something that is really helpful, making sure that everything is working not just for replication but for backups as well.The solution is so easy to manage that I forget it is there.

Overall performance of the solution.The scalability and being able to implement it quickly.Individual settings you can put on each individual volume, if you want to do that.We can add a node, we add compute, we add storage, and we've had really good luck with that.If we get complaints about any kind of performance metric issues, whether it's storage related or something on the virtual side, we use it to pinpoint what the actual issue is.SolidFire is one of the products that does have great APIs right out-of-the-box. It works great. The tools and the other stuff seem to work a little better right out-of-the-box than the ONTAP stuff does, C-Mode.Being able to provide quality of service as promised.Templates are already predefined for it. If you're coding it up, it will take two days. You can pick up a template right there from the API, and it just works for you. Implementation done in 10 minutes.

The support portal needs fixing. ﻿Accessing a service request on the support portal seems to be a bit difficult, as opposed to just calling the 800 number.Dell EMC Unity's competitor, NetApp, has a similar product. However, it has a clustering technology where you can group multiple systems together, then you can move data from one system to another seamlessly. I would like the Unity to do that.﻿﻿It would be nice to have been able to easily move off our old VNX system to this system. The process is very manual.The iSCSI and the VMware integation using vSphere could be less confusing.It needs deduplication. We'd like to have the dedupe capabilities in the Unity.There are a lot of things that can be done with it. It's got Cloud IQ, but I think it's not as mature as it could be, they could make it more effective. They could make it more comparable to some of the other products out there that have cloud analytics. The amount of insight that the Unity product is able to give, at this point, is okay, but not class-leading. Some of the other data-reduction technologies, like deduplication, are not to the level of other competitors and what their products provide.I don't know where the hybrid cloud might be going or what connectivity there is between what was recently released as far as AWS and being able to manage both of them. Maybe there is an on-prem and an AWS instance in the same window, like a single pane, but I would like to see something along those lines, where there wouldn't be two locations to manage storage.We've got an ongoing issue with a Unity where some power supply fans spin up. We've had a whole bunch of hardware changed as a result but I still have an open SR which has been a struggle. It doesn't seem to affect performance, but it's something that we're hoping the engineers can resolve. Also, we had some issues with an upgrade where we can't manage a device, after the upgrade. So we had to have a ticket in for that.

It's a very good Windows-type solution. But we do a lot of legacy systems and the like. So it's getting that incorporated into it that would help us.A little better segregation of the multi-tenancy. Right now, it's just VLAN-specific, that's all you can do.We had some false positives, power supplies failing, and that's really been about it. We had a couple of glitches during some upgrade processes but nothing that was really concerning to us.For example, the ease of use with the reporting. Right now it's not impossible, but you have to know Sequel. It's a little time consuming to get those customized reports in there.They could do a file-based NAS: SolidFire NAS-based. It's probably not its niche, but that is our direction, not to use block, and it's block. Solid state block is what it is.I would like to see integration with the cloud, number one. Being able to spin SolidFire in the cloud.So feature-wise, I would say more reporting tools that could be merged into it.We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI.

Go with the virtual appliance versus the hardware.Licensing is fine. We worked with a sales rep to purchase our Unity.The pricing is reasonable. We're using the Flex on Demand pricing. It's really good for us when we pay for what we use. It made it easy to get it inside since it's an OpEx and instead of CapEx expense.Currently, we buy directly from Dell EMC. We've tried going through resellers before, but we've found that if we go directly through Dell EMC, we get a good a price from being with the government.The pricing is competitive. We miss some of the feature functionality that we had with the XtremeIOs but it's certainly suitable for the purpose.In the SQL Server instances in our data warehouse, we immediately saw a great return on investment.Licensing is a little bit confusing. Going through everything with them, there are a lot of line items to go over. Every single thing is broken down into a line item, and it starts to get really confusing in terms of what we're actually purchasing when it comes to the product.The ROI is right where we need it to be. It's a reasonably priced array.

Dell EMC Unity’s All-Flash and Hybrid Flash storage platforms optimize SSD performance and efficiency, with fully integrated SAN and NAS capabilities. Cloud-based storage analytics and proactive support keep you available and connected.

SolidFire delivers all five core elements needed to deliver newfound storage agility to your next generation data center and beyond. With SolidFire you can deploy new applications and capabilities faster, provide more agile and scalable infrastructure, increase application performance and predictability, enable automation and end-user self-service and raise operational efficiency and reduce cost.

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